Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden TDWG Oct 2013 Florence Italy Art of Life project Finding a goldmine of natural history illustrations within BHL texts: the Art of Life project

Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden TDWG Oct 2013 Florence Italy Art of Life project BHL Problem statement – users want access to images, access to images is limited – How to broaden the audiences for BHL content?

Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden TDWG Oct 2013 Florence Italy Art of Life project What is Art of Life? Full title - The Art of Life: Data Mining and Crowdsourcing the Identification and Description of Natural History Illustrations from the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) Grant given to Missouri Botanical Garden in St Louis Funded by National Endowment for the Humanities Runs May 2012-April 2014

Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden TDWG Oct 2013 Florence Italy Art of Life project

Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden TDWG Oct 2013 Florence Italy Art of Life project 5 Primary Objectives of Art of Life Objective 1: Define an appropriate metadata schema for natural history illustrations Objective 2: Build software tools to automatically identify illustrations in the BHL corpus Objective 3: Enhance existing tools to enable the initial sorting, viewing, and editing of these identified visual resources. Objective 4: Integrate tagging applications to enable a community of users to edit descriptive metadata for the illustrations Objective 5: Integrate the descriptive metadata generated by users back into BHL portal both for access and preservation

Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden TDWG Oct 2013 Florence Italy Art of Life project

Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden TDWG Oct 2013 Florence Italy Art of Life project Current status of Art of Life Development of the algorithms are complete. Running them across entire BHL corpus now. Draft schema for describing natural history illustrations was posted for public review In process of converting to an application profilehttp://tinyurl.com/9hm7nsb Classifier tool complete

Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden TDWG Oct 2013 Florence Italy Art of Life project Algorithms Developed by folks at Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) Lab. Built 4 primary types: – ABBYY (87% accurate) – Contrast (88% accurate) – Color (.09% accurate) – Compression (9% accurate) Tested against a gold standard set of 100 books (40k pages) ABBYY and Contrast were chosen as most effective in finding illustrations

Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden TDWG Oct 2013 Florence Italy Art of Life project Interface designed for BHL to assess performance of algorithms

Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden TDWG Oct 2013 Florence Italy Art of Life project Interface developed to assign broad classes

Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden TDWG Oct 2013 Florence Italy Art of Life project Art of Life Schema Needs to support three objectives: 1) to enable the discovery, description and use of the identified images by artists, biologists, humanities scholars, librarians, and educators 2) to make BHL’s metadata and images available to other platforms 3) to import crowdsourced metadata generated in other platforms back into BHL.

Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden TDWG Oct 2013 Florence Italy Art of Life project Schema landscape review – VRA Core 4.0 (art image community) – LIDO (museum community) – Dublin Core (Web community) – Darwin Core (biodiversity community) – Audubon Core (biodiversity community)

Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden TDWG Oct 2013 Florence Italy Art of Life project ART OF LIFE SCHEMA ELEMENTS red =required Title Type Date Copyright Source Agent Subjects Description Inscription

Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden TDWG Oct 2013 Florence Italy Art of Life project TitleStictospiza formosa TypePaintings DatePublication: 1898 AgentAuthor: Arthur G. Butler ( ) Illustrator: F.W. Frohawk ( ) DescriptionA pair of finches with green and yellow bodies resting on reeds SubjectsBirds, finches Scientific name: Amandava formosa Vernacular Name: Green Avadavat or Green Munia Accepted Name: Amandava formosa (Latham, 1790) Inscriptionsbottom center: Green Amaduvade Waxbill (Stictospiza formosa) Source Butler, Arthur Gardiner. Foreign finches in captivity. Hull and London: Brumby and Clarke, limited,1889 (2nd edition). This image comes from the Biodiversity Heritage Library, and is available online at biodiversitylibrary.org/page/ Biodiversity Heritage Librarybiodiversitylibrary.org/page/ RightsPublic domain Example of illustration described using Art of Life schema

Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden TDWG Oct 2013 Florence Italy Art of Life project How will this project benefit the scientific community? Will provide access to content in BHL that has been largely hidden and difficult to find. Functionality will be added to the BHL portal to allow searching for images by species name, common names, subjects, and illustrators Once the images are available and described in places like Flickr and Wikimedia Commons they will become easily linked to and available in other biodiversity- related platforms such as Wikispecies and EOL Like the text content in BHL, most image content will fall under public domain and be freely available for download and re-use so you can incorporate them into your research and publications

Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden TDWG Oct 2013 Florence Italy Art of Life project Art of Life team PI Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden Algorithm development Ed Bachta, Charlie Moad, Kyle Jaebker, Indianapolis Museum of Art Schema development Gaurav Vaidya and Robert Guralnick, University of Colorado, Boulder William Ulate, Missouri Botanical Garden Programming Mike Lichtenberg, Missouri Botanical Garden Consultants Doug Holland, Missouri Botanical Garden; Chris Freeland, Washington University (former PI for Art of Life)

Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden TDWG Oct 2013 Florence Italy Art of Life project Interested? Here’s how you can help We welcome your feedback on the schema before its finalized! Would love to talk with other folks about their experiences with crowdsourcing of metadata, particularly if you’ve used flickr or Wikimedia commons Spread the word about this free, rich resource of images and help us describe our illustrations!

Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden TDWG Oct 2013 Florence Italy Art of Life project For more info Contact